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Russian technology company Yandex has confirmed that nearly 3% of customer data stored on its cloud platform has been permanently lost following drone attacks on its data centres in October, exposing the risks businesses face when critical digital infrastructure is physically damaged.
In a statement issued on November 10, 2026, the company said its engineers had restored access to 97.16% of affected customer data on Yandex Cloud. However, the remaining 2.84% could not be recovered because of severe hardware damage and the absence of backups for the affected information.
The disclosure provides the first precise assessment of the permanent data loss from the attacks. Yandex also announced changes to its backup arrangements, making automatic backups the default option for newly created virtual machines.
Why Some Cloud Data Could Not Be Recovered
Yandex Cloud provides computing, storage and other digital infrastructure services to businesses and organisations. Customers use such platforms to run applications, store information and manage computing resources without maintaining all the necessary hardware themselves.
The company’s infrastructure suffered extensive disruption after drone strikes targeted several of its Russian data centres between October 8 and October 11.
Facilities in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions sustained damage. Some were forced to shut down completely, while equipment at another site became unusable.
Following the attacks, Yandex engineers worked to restore services and recover information from the affected infrastructure. Although the company succeeded in recovering most customer data, a small proportion remained inaccessible.
Yandex attributed the permanent losses to critical damage to equipment and the absence of usable backups for certain customers.
This distinction is important because the incident was not a conventional cyberattack involving hackers stealing information or deploying ransomware. Instead, physical destruction of computing infrastructure resulted in the loss of digital records.
The company has not publicly identified the affected customers or provided a detailed breakdown of the types of information permanently lost.
Customers With Cloud Backups Avoided Data Loss
One of the most significant findings from Yandex’s recovery assessment concerns the effectiveness of its backup arrangements.
According to the company, customers who had used Yandex Cloud’s backup tools experienced no data loss. All information protected through those tools was preserved despite the disruption.
The contrast highlights an important weakness in cloud infrastructure planning. Storing information on remote servers does not automatically guarantee that it can be recovered if the underlying equipment is destroyed.
Cloud platforms commonly provide backup services that allow customers to maintain additional copies of their information. However, the extent of protection depends on the customer’s configuration and the location of those copies.
Before the October attacks, Yandex Cloud customers had to activate backup functionality themselves. That meant some organisations may have been operating virtual machines without the additional protection offered by the service.
Following the incident, Yandex changed its default settings.
New virtual machines now have backup functionality enabled automatically. Customers can still choose to disable it, but the company has made backup protection the standard starting configuration.
The change is intended to reduce the risk of similar losses during future infrastructure failures.
Yandex Expands Infrastructure Across Russian Regions
Beyond recovering customer information, Yandex is also changing how its computing infrastructure is distributed.
The company said engineers are continuing to move cloud computing resources across additional independent locations in Russia. It intends to increase the number of these locations over time.
Distributing infrastructure across geographically separate facilities can reduce dependence on any single data centre.
If one location experiences physical damage, a technical failure or a major disruption, workloads and information stored elsewhere may remain available.
However, geographical distribution alone does not guarantee complete protection. Organisations also need reliable recovery procedures and backup copies that remain accessible when primary systems fail.
The October attacks demonstrated how physical strikes on data centres can affect services far beyond the buildings themselves.
Businesses relying on cloud platforms may experience interruptions to applications, databases, payment systems and other operations when infrastructure becomes unavailable.
Yandex’s latest disclosure shows that, in some circumstances, the consequences can extend beyond temporary service outages to irreversible information loss.
What This Means For You
For businesses using cloud services, the incident is a reminder that information stored online still depends on physical computing equipment.
Companies should verify whether their cloud accounts have automatic backups enabled and whether those backups are stored separately from primary systems.
They should also understand how quickly their data can be restored if an entire data centre becomes unavailable.
The Yandex incident illustrates the difference between restoring access to a service and recovering every piece of information it previously held.
Although the company restored more than 97% of affected data, the permanent loss of the remaining portion demonstrates how gaps in backup arrangements can turn an infrastructure disruption into an irreversible business problem.
